Tate's Turner exhibition will show how he laboured to outdo Old Masters

The British artist tirelessly reinterpreted works by old masters and contemporaries to show just how good his own paintings were, according to the curators of the exhibition, Turner and the Masters.

It will bring together dozens of his works to be displayed alongside paintings by those who influenced him, including Canaletto, Claude, Lorrain, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Ruisdael, and van de Velde.

Professor David Solkin, co-curator, said: "Every artist learns from artists who come before. But nobody else does it with so many."

He said at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries London was "flooded with Old Masters" and major exhibitions, opening up the eyes of British painters and "overwhelming" a lot of them.

"But Turner thinks, 'I can do what they did even better," said Prof Solkin

Among the paintings to be shown together will be Turner's The Deluge (1805-13), which he painted as a response to Nicolas Poussin's Winter – The Deluge...